FirstNet America’s national ‘First Responder’ surveillance & spying network

MassPrivateI

Article first appeared in privacysos.org:

FirstNet is a public/private cooperative surveillance and information exchange enterprise—avast network to share Americans’ personal information—conceived by and written into law with the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012. By law, FirstNet’s purpose is to “create a nationwide, wireless, interoperable, public safety broadband network,” a euphemism that means, “increase the ease with which government agencies share private and public information about people.” By consolidating the placement of points of reference and interoperability for each potential node of state, local, commercial, and other communications networks, FirstNet is a blueprint for making surveillance data-sharing national, lightning-fast, and independent from the insecure, heavily monitored public internet.  

The  $7 billion network is an effort to centralize the myriad platforms the government uses to collect and access Americans’ information. This means that sharing of biometrics, license plate tracking data, video surveillance, and intelligence will get substantially easier for law enforcement, and that our grasp on privacy will become even more tenuous. That said, not everything about FirstNet is bad. The network will probably do things like make sure fire trucks do not lose contact with fire stations as they travel from one cell tower to another. But there are lots of nefarious and troubling ways the network will be used, too, like to enable law enforcement to mine personal information from multiple jurisdictions at once, with hardly any external oversight.

Officials as high up as the Department of Justice are going out of their way to hide critical information about FirstNet development from public scrutiny. The managers of the program have staged a series of PR sessions around the country for groups of local officials, first responders, and industry figures, but have done little to inform the people against whom the technology will be used. In a telling omission, a FirstNet slide describing its points of outreach fails to dignify with a bullet point “the public” —yet it makes sure to do so for vendors, applications developers, congress, and media, most of whom stand to benefit from and shape the future impact of the surveillance apparatus.

The body initially responsible for determining a minimum set of technical capabilities for FirstNet’s operation—separate from its Board—was comprised of telecom executives, officers of multiple defense companies, and public officials, and its recommended philosophy for the ostensibly public project is chilling: “FirstNet must fully embrace the technologies, standards and best practices used by commercial service providers.” Even if we operate under the assumption that the program’s public safety purpose would be limited to things like enabling the remote prioritization of medical care at the scenes of public emergencies, there’s great danger that, as this influential Public Intelligence reporton the program notes, the significant corporate influence over its development has perverted any legitimate purpose the program might have had.

The FirstNet Board features high-profile members of the American surveillance establishment, including former Secretary of Homeland Security (and current embattled University of California President) Janet Napolitano, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Assistant NYPD Chief Chuck Dowd. Private industry is also well represented on the Board, a disheartening prospect given what we know about telecom’s shaky commitment to privacy.

Overall, emphasis in FirstNet appears to be on breaking down information sharing barriers among law enforcement agencies and private corporations. An early set of guidelines for the program anticipates, for example, that, the networks will service secondary users—corporate and non-local clients—and should be arranged so that, “devices outside of their normal jurisdiction to connect to a local packet data network and to the device’s home packet data network to carry out incident objectives.” This means that in cases of unspecified emergency, FirstNet clients will be able to skirt normal blocks to info-sharing and pluck data from others’ networks.

By integrating solutions to resource-based obstacles for the increased use of invasive monitoring technologies like fingerprint readers and license plate scanning, FirstNet subverts privacy in favor of surveillance, with near endless possibilities for overreach. A recent article reporting successful negotiations between FirstNet and municipalities over the use of the 700MHz wireless spectrum, for example, notes FirstNet’s enthusiasm about a partnership with a Denver-area 911 network due to its proximity to an airport and thus the prospect for manipulating wireless traffic there.

The public-private surveillance partnership FirstNet provides incentives to local agencies to upgrade and use mobile biometric and real time surveillance technologies. It also increases the number of persons who can access—and thus abuse—the personal information law enforcement agencies send across it. The carelessness that often characterizes United States government treatment of personal data—a recent report including descriptions of shocking flaws in DHS data hygiene  stands out—becomes a much higher stakes problem when departments nationwide are hooked into the same base of data.

We need to know more about how FirstNet is being developed and about what kinds of corporations will be allowed to tap into the private network. We need to know if under FirstNet, information held by a county or police department is fair game for others hooked into the program. The government is building a top-tier, secure internet for itself, through which it can communicate and quickly transmit surveillance data about us. We should be arguing for fewer police departments with their hands on our data, not more.
http://privacysos.org/node/1360

NY to install audio, video recorders in trains under the guise of safety:

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced its plan to install several thousand audio and video recorders on its commuter trains Wednesday, reportedly in response to federal safety recommendations.

According to the National Transportation Safety Board, several derailments last year have prompted the need for vast surveillance on a majority of the city’s trains.

“We will be systematically implementing recommendations put forward by the NTSB and other regulators to ensure the best practices are adhered to throughout the MTA family,” MTA chairman Thomas Prendergast said.

Transportation officials claim the surveillance technology will be focused on conductors and their staff to ensure proper safety guidelines are followed.

“Safety must come first at Metro-North,” Metro-North President Joseph Giulietti said. “Safety was not the top priority. It must be and it will be.”

Officials say the technology will also be used to control undesirable behavior while giving detailed conversations and video to accident investigators following any derailment or incident.

Along with surveillance capabilities, “positive train control technology” will be installed as well, giving a computer program the ability to override a conductor’s decisions.

Although the vast majority of cameras will be placed around passengers, no mention was made of how long their conversations would be stored.

DHS is responsible for our ever expanding spy state.

In 2011, the Department of Homeland Security began funding an effort in San Francisco to install real-time cameras on more than 350 buses.

In 2012, city buses in Baltimore began recording the conversations of bus drivers and passengers in order to “investigate crimes.”

While surveillance technology remains at the forefront, more direct intrusions such as TSA style security checkpoints have been rolled out at train stations, bus terminals and semi-truck weigh stations.

Even E-ZPass is being used to track (spy) on motorists outside of toll booths, click here to read more.
http://www.storyleak.com/new-york-trains-install-audio-video-recorders/

Medical monitoring or “telemedicine” is being used to spy on you at home:

Ernestine Marshall can’t even go to the bathroom without someone knowing.

“I didn’t know how closely they were watching me until I received a phone call, and I was like, whoa! Ok!” she said.

The diabetic and MS patient’s home is outfitted by insurer, Humana, with sensors that keep track of when she opens her medicine cabinet, her fridge, sleeps, walks, and uses the bathroom.

A break in routine is an early sign of trouble.

“If it becomes unusual, I will get a phone call,” she said. “(They say), ‘Ms. Marshall, are you alright? Do we need to call your sister?'”

The sensors are monitored by workers at a Humana building in Carillon in Pinellas County, but she also gets a monthly visit from a field agent. (A field agent? This  is the Gestapo (NSA/DHS) on steroids, just imagine how much data they’re collecting.)

The sensors allow her to live in her own apartment, instead of at an assisted living facility.

“It makes me feel wonderful, to know I’m being monitored, especially living alone,” Marshall said.

A lot of people don’t care one bit that they’re under surveillance in their homes 24/7. It’s a beautiful thing. And then there are a whole lot of other people who wouldn’t opt for the surveillance themselves, but feel wonderful that people like Ernestine Marshall feel wonderful.

“Ms. Marshall, we notice you didn’t sit outside for an hour and half today, like you usually do. You didn’t go out at all. Is everything okay?”

“We notice you didn’t flush the toilet today. Are you all right?”

“We didn’t hear you cooking. Did you order in? We didn’t hear a knock on your door.”

“Remote doctors” are being touted in conjunction with at-home spying on patients. People won’t need to make a trip to an office or clinic very often. An online doc will handle their case.

Medical insurers, including all the Obamacare carriers, will offer to monitor patients’ activity in their homes and inside their bodies. And when they leave the house, things will be wonderful then as well, because why bother spying on people where they live unless you can do it at the mall, too?

“We want to be able to oversee you all the time, so we can do everything to keep you healthy.”

“Thank you so much.”

As a side bonus, the US national health insurance plan requires a medical ID package for every patient in the system. This becomes a de facto national ID card.

“Please show me your medical ID…excuse me, what? It’s not in your wallet? It’s not under your skin? You aren’t in the health system? Officer needs assistance. We have an outlier. I repeat, we have an outlier.”

Obviously, such a person must be questioned. He’s a hold-out. He could be dangerous. Does he have political literature in his house? Does he own a gun? Are his children up to date on their 55 vaccinations? Has he ever seen a psychiatrist? Does he possess any energy devices that place him off the grid? Does he grow his own food?

Eventually, the medical tracking sensors in a person’s home will be able to answer all those questions without the need for a police stop.

And it’ll be wonderful.

And finally, when the spy sensors show that a patient is having a very serious toxic reaction to a medical drug, that fact will automatically be shunted out of the system, and instead, a diagnosis of a new disease or disorder will be entered, to falsely account for the patient’s reaction—and a new (toxic) drug will be automatically delivered to the patient’s door, to treat the new non-existent disorder.
http://www.myfoxtampabay.com/story/25022711/2014/03/19/the-debate-over-medical-monitoring
http://www.activistpost.com/2014/03/welcome-to-telemedicine-spying-on-you.html#more

http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2014/03/firstnet-americas-national-surveillance.html